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The Best Ideas On How Parents Can Help Their Kids Succeed In School

I’ve found several good resources ideas on how parents can best help their children learn (including ideas on how to best respond to problems their children are having in school), and decided to bring them together in one post. You can see all my parent engagement-related “The Best” lists here.

Here are my picks for The Best Ideas On How Parents Can Help Their Kids Succeed In School:

“But What If I Don’t Know English?” is another great resource from Colorin Colorado. It ideas on how parents who don’t speak English can still help their children develop literacy skills.

Census: Parents Reading More With Their Children is a new Education Week article that includes useful research that teachers might want to with parents. It could be used to help parents see what are some good ways they could interact with their children to encourage learning.

En Camino: Educational Toolkit For Families is a series of free online “modules,” available in both English and Spanish, designed to help answer parent and student questions about college. It’s from the National Center For Family Literacy.

New York Times’ columnist Tom Friedman has published a pretty interesting column on the importance of parent involvement, though I do wish he had a better headline than “How About Better Parents?” In it, he highlights a a couple of new studies (and includes links to them) and quotes one researcher:

Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”

College Bound is a series of videos — both in English and Spanish — designed to help parents get ideas on how they can support their children academically. Parent have to register at the site in order to watch them, but it only takes a few seconds to do so. The videos are very accessible, and a few of them seem useful enough for teachers to use them in the classroom with students.

Research suggests that one of the best things parents can do to support a child is to help him/her develop a motivation to learn. Larry Ferlazzo, a teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, has identified three key ways to do this, supported by studies from the National Research Council and the Center on Education Policy:

• Praise effort and specific work instead of native intelligence. Try saying: “Boy, those two hours you spent working on the essay last night really paid off. I loved how you described the characters in the novel” instead of “Wow, you are a natural-born writer.”

• Connect what children are studying to what is happening in their life and in the world. If he is learning about the Middle East, discuss a newspaper article about issues in that region.

• Avoid using rewards and punishments for academic work. If you give your child a dollar for every book he reads, it’s less likely he will want to read books for pleasure after you stop paying him.

Among the administrator’s most successful parent-engagement undertakings are the Parent University College Tours, which provides parents a much-needed firsthand look at postsecondary opportunities available to their children. For many Cleveland parents, the tours may be their first time visiting a college campus. (All Cleveland students come from families with incomes low enough to qualify them for federal free and reduced-price school lunches.)

Here’s a video that accompanied the article:

I’ve previously posted about an excellent Canadian organization that promotes parent involvement in schools, People For Education.

One thought on “The Best Ideas On How Parents Can Help Their Kids Succeed In School”

One very simple thing parents can do at home is turn on the captions whenever their kids are watching TV. Research shows that it can significantly boost a variety of reading skills! For more info, check out http://captionsforliteracy.org .

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